20 AMONG OTHERS

College, the red-brick pile in Victorian baroque
which jhe Prince Consort and the Lord Derby of
that day had planted on Bagshot Heath in 1856,
and parasitic too, to a lesser degree, upon the red-
brick criminal lunatic asylum of Broadmoor, a
mile or two away across the firs. But village, school
and asylum seemed but transient intruders upon
those ancient heathlands. For thousands of years
the lonely heath had stretched, unscarred by a
single human dwelling, scarcely changing from
century to century. No one lived here until there
was steam to bring food from far afield, for these
were not lands to till. Through unnumbered ages
this was hunting ground. Hunters of the flint age
flung their spears here, and overshooting their
mark, left them to lie two or three thousand yean;
in the heather until Professor Jones picked them up
and presented them to the College Museum, Britons
cut the Devil's Highway across the heather north of
what is now the village and Romans raised the road
and drained it, for it led to Silchester. Set out along
the Devil's Highway towards Bagshot and to this
day, though you are not much more than thirty
miles from the heart of London, you may walk
five miles without setting eye on man or dwelling,
Most of the Kings of England chased the stag in
these parts. In a map of 1607 Crowthorne was the
name of a solitary tree which marked the boundary
of four forest walks. Gradually through this
measureless extent of time these desolate lands
acquired a sombre spirit of their own, wholly in-
different to man. There are countrysides—almost
all the Home Counties, for example, in which